As a Girl She Spent Time in the Library. Now She’s Giving It $20 Million.

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Merryl H. Tisch, the former chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, among the books at Seward Park Library on the Lower East Side where she used to come with her grandmother as a child. She and her husband are donating $20 million to the New York Public Library.CreditJoshua Bright for The New York Times

Merryl H. Tisch, the former chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, and her husband, James S. Tisch, the president and chief executive of Loews Corporation, are giving $20 million to the New York Public Library to expand and strengthen its education programming, from early literacy classes to technology training.

The Tisches’ gift will create a position for a director of education, reporting to the library’s president, Tony Marx. While whoever is hired for that job will ultimately shape the vision for how to use the gift, Dr. Tisch said in an interview that she hoped the library would be able to expand popular offerings like English language classes, as well as to add job training courses, after-school homework help and programs aimed at exposing students to the rich holdings of the system’s four research centers.

In the digital era, libraries are increasingly becoming community centers, where people come for many reasons, including for classes or simply to access the internet.

“If we get the right director, and hopefully we will,” Dr. Tisch said, “this becomes a blueprint for what urban libraries across the country should be turning themselves into.”

Christopher Platt, the chief branch library officer, said that, to his knowledge, “This is the first educational gift to public libraries of this scale in the country.”

The New York Public Library, which has branches throughout Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island — Brooklyn and Queens have their own systems — receives just over half its overall operating costs, and more than 80 percent of the operating costs of its branches, from the city. The administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio has increased funding to the city’s three library systems by $43 million in the last two years, allowing the libraries to expand offerings and opening hours.

The New York Public Library is also in the process of renovating many branches, including five of the original libraries financed by Andrew Carnegie.

Apart from city agencies, the library is the primary provider of free adult literacy and English language classes in the city, and in recent years it has quintupled the number of seats in such classes, serving 12,000 people at 42 locations. But Mr. Platt said that the demand for such classes was much greater than that.

“That’s a drop in the bucket,” he said.

Similarly, he said, the library currently reaches some 350,000 people per year with popular early literacy programs like story time. But, he said, “there’s a lot of potential to build out what early literacy and family literacy is.”

For example, a pilot program being offered at the Inwood Library in Manhattan, called the Bilingual Family Literacy Breakfast Program, provides workshops to parents of prekindergarten students at a local school about how to supplement what their children are learning at home. Most of the parents are Spanish speaking.

The library system also has 3,000 slots available in after school programs and 100,000 slots in technology classes for children and adults. Adult coding classes have had waiting lists of around 1,000 people, a library spokeswoman, Angela Montefinise, said.

Dr. Tisch, whose husband sits on the library’s board of directors, said that she grew up going to the Seward Park Library on the Lower East Side with her friends and sometimes with her grandmother, an immigrant from Poland. She said that some people had urged her to finance a building project for the library, but she was more interested in supporting programs. She said she would not micromanage the use of the gift, but she will participate in the search for the education director.

Dr. Tisch has not commented on the board’s actions, and she did not break that streak in an interview this week. Instead, she laid out a new political agenda for herself: She said that, along with her gift, she planned to push the mayor to increase funding for the library system so that more branches can open on Sundays. Currently only eight of the system’s 92 locations are open seven days a week; almost all others are open six days. As a comparison, Dr. Tisch pulled out a print out of programs at the Scarsdale Public Library, showing its long opening hours, including evenings Monday through Wednesday, and five hours on Sunday.

“You don’t need to be a genius to know, if the kids in Scarsdale need it, then the kids in the Bronx need it, too,” she said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: As a Girl She Spent Time in the Library. Now She’s Giving It $20 Million.. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe